Race in America: Clinton will leave it alone, Obama might talk about it

March 25th, 2008 by yaman | Posted in Comment |

In the back and forth between the campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, I generally have had little to say. It is only today, with Clinton’s sneaky remarks about the so-called “controversy” regarding Obama’s pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, that I feel impelled to write about one way race has entered this campaign. It is only now, with Reverend Wright’s comments in the spotlight and the associated discomfort most Americans feel upon hearing them, that we are finally beginning to recognize what it means to potentially have a president who is different. More accurately, it is a clarification of the real nature of that “difference” that so far has not been properly appreciated, having been relegated to the mere fact that Barack Obama has black skin.

Earlier today, Clinton, saying-it-without-saying-it, told reporters:

“I think given all we have heard and seen, he [the Reverend Jeremiah Wright] would not have been my pastor.”

and

“You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend.”

All this marks the end of a silence from Clinton’s campaign regarding Reverend Wright and his relationship to Barack Obama (and, if we’re to believe the media’s narrative play-by-play of this election, occurs at a point of vulnerability for her given the way her version of reality in Bosnia conflicted with… well, reality). Rather than assert Obama’s right to attend the church of his choice, Clinton overstepped her bounds and criticized his choice of church. Rather than point to the fact that Obama and Wright were two separate people, and that Obama should not be held responsible for the statements of another person, Clinton had the audacity to claim that the burden was on Obama to “leave” his church if…

…if what? The condition has, for the most part, gone unsaid, but it is not difficult to understand. When Hillary Clinton begins to pontificate, “if I were him, I would have done this” on an issue of this nature, she is really delivering the message, “if he were like me, he would have done this.” Since Obama didn’t do it like that, though, he clearly is not like her, or you, or you, or you–you can almost see her handpicking the folks in her audience writhing uncomfortably in their seats at the thought of angry black people. On an issue of this nature, there is no other way to take what she has said than as a message meant to illuminate differences between her and Obama, between white and black Americans, for the sake of evoking divisions that she promises to respect and maintain and which, incidentally, work to her electoral benefit.

Here we come to the critical difference between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton when they address issues of race in America, especially the discourse of black and white. Clinton is looking to identify with your discomfort with race, especially when colored people talk about it and especially when you’re white, while Obama is looking to use it as a point of engagement. It’s the point where Clinton–as she said she would have done it–is ready to “leave” you, while Obama is ready for you both to leave together.

I don’t doubt Hillary Clinton when she says she would have left the pastor, but that is exactly what’s wrong with her. If we are to look at Clinton’s statement on another level and within the context of her campaign, and if we are to recognize that the “pastor” here is a metonymy for “aggrieved people of color,” then it is clear that Clinton is not talking about abandoning only Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the man, but every person he represents and every issue he speaks about. In other words, Clinton is saying, “I’m here for you, not them. You can’t be so sure about the other guy, though.”

Now, this message is nothing new. The American political elite has “left” serious questions of race, as they come to affect actual communities around our country, out of the picture and at the margins since the 1960s. Even then, the political elite did not decide out of its own goodness to bring the issues out from the cold: in reality, the issues were brought to them, and the elites had to do whatever they could to get them back out of the way. And, at the end of the day, those communities themselves were also left out of the political elite. It wasn’t only the issues, but also the people who the elite had abandoned.

That is not necessarily because the elite like Clinton are racist, or because they hate people of color. It’s because the discussion is uncomfortable not only for them, but for other Americans for whom the discussion on race puts their own privilege into perspective. But hate is not the only thing that makes a legitimate political issue, and the political discussion has suffered from that fact, that every grievance has had to take the form of finding (even imagining) the hatred which causes it all.

What is at stake here are differences that are more serious and more real than the superficial obsession with skin color that America’s honeymoon with Barack Obama has taken thus far. Given the love that a lot of mainstream media has shown towards Obama over the past year (CNN last year sent a special unit to Indonesia to debunk right-wing claims he “attended a madrassa” within hours of its circulation!), it is telling that the first “issue” over which anybody could seriously claim objection to Barack Obama were the statements of Reverend Wright.

Reverend Wright became the first blemish on Obama’s campaign, but thanks to Clinton’s phobic remarks, we have come to a point today where the suggestion is being made that the defect was not a blemish at all, but in fact is the first glimpse of what Obama really looks like once the make-up begins to fall away: a black man. No, really: a black man. Hillary Clinton is trying to remind you of just that fact: that at the end of the day, Obama is a black man who, while you might want to coil away in fear and disgust, will actually listen to what people like Reverend Jeremiah Wright are saying, why they are saying it, and what it means for them to say it.

There is a meaningful difference between the two, but it cannot be appreciated without first looking at a sample of the Reverend’s statements:

“The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, and passes a three strikes law, and then wants us to sing God Bless America? No, no, no, not God Bless America, God Damn America, that’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God Damn America for treating her citizens as less than human.”

“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye…. We have supported state terror against the Palestinians and black South Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards!”

It is not a far cry to claim that these statements are “divisive”–but nobody ever claimed that they were meant to “heal” or “connect” or anything of the sort. They were not intended for a white audience, for a rich audience, for YouTube, for Bill O’Reilly, or for Anderson Cooper. They were intended very particularly for his church congregation, and as such, should be evaluated primarily within that context.

Thus far–and not even Barack Obama can fully escape this criticism–the discussion about what Jeremiah Wright said has taken the form of “condemning” it as “wrong,” “hurtful,” or “divisive.” Perhaps even “hateful” or “anti-American,” if you watch The O’Reilly Factor. Here, however, the discussion has failed, and is awfully uninformative.

While for Bill O’Reilly (let’s give him the benefit of the doubt just this once) these statements may appear hateful, I have great difficulty believing that Reverend Wright, his church, and his congregation devote their time primarily towards seeding hate of white people, as the media characterization suggests. Here, of course, is where one’s dedication to understanding others is put to the test. For the man saying them, for the congregation feeling them, and for anybody else who might sympathize with them, the words likely do not come across as hateful and do not leave them filled with hate of white people. In what Reverend Wright said, “God Damn America” was not synonymous with “God Damn Americans,” or “God Destroy Americans,” or “God Damn White People,” etc. In other words, I don’t think that there was an ounce of ill-will here except for those acts of criminality of which nobody can say that neither America or some Americans were guilty for.

That is the sort of engagement that is missing in all media coverage about this controversy, in nearly all discussions about race more generally (and it is not only “white people” who are guilty, but all participants), and in Clinton’s attitude and behavior nowadays. On the other hand, it is precisely the sort of thing that Obama alluded to in his speech last week. It’s neither the sort of battle-to-blame that Clinton wants you to think it is, nor is it the not uncommon impression that this is just another therapy session about “that PC race bullshit.”

During the civil rights era, at best, steps towards justice on some issues were made, but few if any steps nation-wide were made towards reconciliation–and at least part of the reason is that “justice” was never served, and that a number of serious issues continue to aggrieve many communities and many people around this country. A more important reason, however, is that people have not thought seriously about race in a very long time. Since Reagan, popular discussions about race are super-facile, inane, annoying, and have, no wonder, turned most people off to the idea that a serious, informative, important, and non-polemical discussion can exist.

Nobody should be made to feel “guilty” for something they didn’t do, but the solution is not to adopt Hillary Clinton’s escapism, nor is it to privilege the truth of one perspective over another. A solution can only be facilitated in an environment where the impulse is not to condemn then discard, in the way that Hillary Clinton and most media have followed (and incidentally in the same way that the charge of “racist” has often been employed), but rather to find ways of closing the distance between people who have grown up in different environments, with different realities, and different understandings of the world and other people. Hillary Clinton has already made it clear that she is not interested in creating a space in public discourse for such an environment; Barack Obama–at great risk to his campaign–appears to be offering something different.

In short, Barack Obama has the potential to bring “race” back into legitimate political and public discourse in a way that departs from the limited and exclusive employment we have now, as in accusations that a person or statement is “racist,” or in promoting “diversity.” This is something new, and many people are reluctant to go along. Clinton, with her statements today in mind, is opportunistically seizing upon that reluctance as a way to build support for her campaign by desperately feeding off of latent fears and doubts regarding Obama (or, perhaps, regarding black people in general). The sad thing, however, is that the strategy may work. Clinton’s media henchmen–paralleling, interestingly enough, some of the smear tacticians who worked on more famous people of color in the past–have already taken to characterizing Obama as “just another angry ethnic person,” a stereotype and caricature which itself is problematic, but which many people believe in.

While I have taken a liking towards Obama’s approach to this issue, I should be clear that this is not an endorsement of Barack Obama for president. Far from it. He made hurtful and offensive remarks in his speech and in recent weeks that I will never forget and for which I will never forgive him. There is nothing more problematic or infuriating than watching a man who speaks passionately against oppression and marginalization in this country, accept with open arms the oppression and marginalization of the Palestinian people at the hands of Israel. There was nothing more nauseating than watching this man formally request that the UN hold its mouth while Israel held 1.5 million Palestinians under siege and killed over 110 Palestinians, over 1/3rd of them children, in less than 4 days. There was nothing more hurtful than watching this man respond to “accusations” that he was a Muslim with vigorous denial, rather than the principled stand that Muslim citizens, like all other citizens in this country, have the right to run for president without having their ancestry subjected to unwarranted scrutiny.

Despite all this, there is nothing more exciting than noticing the possibility for a comprehensive and inclusive dialogue to occur on a nation-wide level on issues of marginalization, disenfranchisement, and exclusion. I should admit that it’s a sad thing that expectations are so low, that we need the political capital of somebody like Barack Obama for such a discussion to occur in the first place–or, at least, for people to pay attention to it. These points aside, let us see where this can and will go before passing judgment, if Hillary Clinton’s cynical campaign doesn’t kill the dream first.